Today marks one year since The Flying Climate Activist came out.
To celebrate, I thought about doing a FAQ, but there’s really only one question people ever ask me about the book.
I never quite know what to say.
When you publish through a traditional publisher, you don’t get minute-by-minute sales updates like you do with a crowdfunding campaign. Thankfully! I love that I can’t obsess over the numbers.
Besides, people aren’t exactly asking how many copies it sold, they want to know how it did. So I thought a year later, it’s good time to reflect on what it taught me.
Getting published is only a little bit life-changing.
Making books doesn’t have to be lonely.
Publicity starts much earlier than I thought.
Before this book, I used to envy people who landed book deals. I imagined it would lead to an inbox full of interesting projects to choose from and high fives on the street. While that was definitely not the case for me, it did open some doors.
Since the book came out, I’ve had some publicity through podcasts and newspapers, picked up a few commissions, and been invited to speak at a major comics event. It also gave me more confidence in the writing side of making comics. I don’t think I would have had the nerve to approach someone like Emma Ringelding—an established comic artist—to collaborate on my next project if I hadn’t written this book.
That said, I still wake up feeling like the same person I was before it was published. I’m usually somewhere between these two sentiments:
In other words, getting a book deal was a stepping stone, not a rocket ship.
When I finished The Flying Climate Activist, I already had a first draft of my next project ready to go. However, I found myself oddly unenthusiastic about diving in. After a while, I realised what the problem was: I didn’t actually want to go straight from one huge solo project to another. Then I had a revelation: I didn’t have to.
So I asked Emma to take over half of the drawing. She had already drawn a comic I had written for teen magazine Tina and I love how that turned out…
To be fair, this particular book I’m working on makes collaboration easy because it’s told from two different perspectives. But authors working together on a book isn’t exactly unheard of, and it turned out to be exactly what I needed.
I’m really enjoying having someone to bounce ideas off instead of arguing with myself all day.
I’m learning a huge amount from watching Emma’s process, seeing someone else's rough sketches, doubts and revisions has also been very reassuring. It turns out other comic artists don't simply pull perfect images out of their sleeves either. I’m also much more excited about the eventual book launch now that it’s something we can organise—and celebrate—together.
Here’s something I did already know about myself: the moment a book is finished, it’s old news for me. Once the book rolls off the press, I’m already up to my knees in the next shiny project, which makes it really hard to come up with ideas to present the ‘old’ book. What I failed to do, is come up with a plan to tackle that issue. That’s why this time, I’m already making a list of ways to promote this book. The goal is to have a full publicity plan ready by the time I hand the pages over to the publisher. That way, when publication day arrives and I’m distracted by some exciting new project, at least Past Me will have left behind a set of instructions.
There’s one thing that happened at my book launch that has really stuck with me.
A friend walked in and said, “Why didn’t you invite EVERYONE?”
I was a bit taken aback, but I knew what she meant. I’d invited the people I thought would be interested in the book, making my best guess about who that might be. Once it was out in the world, I realised I had seriously underestimated both who would want to read it and who would be willing to help me promote it.
Ironically, the most life-changing thing this book gave me was the understanding that I don’t have to do everything by myself. People are often more interested in your work—and more willing to support it—than you think.
So for this next book, I will most definitely invite EVERYONE and their neighbours.
With love,
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